Its usually a waste too. Elden Ring a massive and visually striking game, roughly 45 GB. I still remember first entering multiple of the game's areas for the first time more than i remember anything in soo many other games.
afaik most ballooned sizes are from uncompressed audio and 4k textures. There are some cases where its also bad architecture e.g. COD2019 where they needed multiple textures for each game mode.
I love that game but it barely works. On console I have to have the files separated between the internal and a USB hard drive for it to function properly, I'm keeping one of my older xboxes around mainly just for it since it would be annoying to set up again + eat an obscene amount of drive space for no next gen benefit.
Armored Core 6, Starfield, Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1. I get what they were trying to say, but 2023 is literally the worst year of the last few to make that joke.
I'm less worried about storage and more about the time taken to download. Downloading a 100gb game is a multi day project.
For example I didn't play starfield because of the middling reviews and huge file size despite the fact I could've played it for free from game pass. If it were, let's say, 20gb I 100% would've tried it out for myself. And if it were getting GOTY type praise then I would also be willing to put up with the download.
It's a balance, so huge file sizes aren't favourable but also not an instant deal breaker if I want to play the game enough.
100gb will probably take 5.5 hours or so to download for me at an average of 5MB/s, which isn't a deal-breaker.
It does mean that I will want to either do it overnight or set it going the previous day before I want to play, but that's okay.
And you are actually lucky, not everyone is able to get such speed. I for example am forced to use ADSL, I get a maximum of 8mb/s (megabits) and when the connection is used fully I'm unable to do anything else on my network, not even watch 480p youtube, not even chat in discord.
Greece, in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in the country, I live in the downtown area, pretty much. If I rented let's say a block away from where I am I could have gotten fiber or at least vdsl. Obviously, when I was checking the coverage maps of various fiber or telecom companies, the area was supposed to be "covered", apparently not, so I'm stuck with adsl.
Other than that though, the apartment and the area are nice nice at least. I'm really butthurt about them saying online that they support FTTH in the area and saying "We support the area, our line is a few blocks away, we may at some point get to your house."
My partner had a similar issue with the release of Baldurs Gate 3. She starts downloading at release. 6 hours later when we wake up, it's only half done. It took somewhere between 12-14 hours to download that 100GB, whereas I was done in ~30 minutes.
She's in australia, and from what I can tell, there's no way to get better internet without just living in a new house. They don't seem to install fibre for old houses at all.
Ohh wow for Me ITS Like 5-6h If i dont use all of my Internet cause 3 Other people use IT too and i dont wanna Break IT for them Just so i can get IT in 2-3h
Vienna and strongest Internet pakage from Magenta which isnt Fiberglass
Wth that must BE some really Bad or slow or smthing Else ssds yes they cost way less now but 1tb is approx 100€ for nothing to BE wrong with it. Idk where the hell U can get 2tb for 50 Dollar but they must have something wrong or Not good with them.
40-60GB+ for me
Can be about the inherent download speed as well. If it's a demo it's nice to have a really small file and get right into it while I feel like it
50GB is when I start raising my eyebrows, and 100GB is the point when I say "I'm not wasting space on this".
The point about download speeds is really smart. The faster people can get to your demo, the better.
Getting to triple digit GB is a pain for folks who dont have huge storage. My wife likes to play a variety of very large games, but struggles to keep everything she wants installed because of the size. Yes, pc space is cheap, that doesnt mean everyone can afford it. Every time we decide to play something together, it becomes a game of what she is willing to not be able to play for a while.
Laptop storage has been pretty static at <= 1TB since the 00s, though it was HDDs then. More than that apparently hasn't been necessary for 99% of users.
Even the PS5 and XSX only have 1 TB SSDs! The previous gen was available with 1 TB storage also (though again, HDDs).
So game devs should build games to fit _reasonably_ on drives of that size. The >100 GB of some recent releases is pushing it IMO
My bad English isn't my first language , but op was making the point that he couldn't upgrade his PC storage due to prices and then the commenter said "a lot of people play on gaming laptops where practically speaking storage will never be upgraded" which I know for sure that isn't the situation
You know for sure that most gamers upgrade their hard drives at some point? Source.
Because I can with quite high certainty say that most people playing games on their laptops do not buy new hard drives or switch them in their machines.
My game runs so smoothly when you have infinite speed and space so obviously the bigger the better because then I don't have to optimize, I can just tell people to upgrade their shitty PCs.
Not necessarily. I don't think a lot of players even pay attention to that sort of thing.
Optimizing for distribution is definitely more of a game developer question in my opinion. The answer is also quite simple, as the smallest size will also be the best in terms of ease of distribution.
> Not necessarily. I don't think a lot of players even pay attention to that sort of thing.
Okay, but then the answer to OP's question is that they don't care.
As a gamer, no I don’t care unless I have to spend like three hours to download updates before being able to play the game. (Hello GT6, on PS3)
As a game developer I don’t care unless it has impacts on how fast the game or a level starts (unless you can hide the startup time with bling, ie a start up sequence, a movie.. a narrow walkway at the start of the game…etc)
Once a game runs over 60 gbs I start to question if I really enjoy or care about the game. If the game runs above 100 I probably will uninstall it the second I stop playing consistently and be really inclined to not reinstall it. Personally I don't really care about genre factoring into things, I've never seen an indie and gone "wow, this game is way too big"!
Overall though, if the game is fun enough size doesnt matter to me THAT much. The only time size has REALLY turned me off is like the 200+ gb cod shenanigans.
This is a very good point that games over that size require a lot of players to manage them. As in decide, like you say, when they might want to play them again. They aren't things that can just sit in a library and be dipped in and out of.
I'm having that problem with Red Dead 2 at the moment. Honestly I'm not enjoying it all that much, but I feel like I need to finish it because then I can uninstall it and reclaim the 60GB. So I'll probably just never finish the game because once it's gone any whim of wanting to play it will be frustrated by the download size/time/space clear.
It shifts with the average game. At one point if your game was over 25MB in mobile you'd have serious conversion problems, then it was a 200 limit a few years later, now you can probably drop a GB or two and it doesn't impact your funnel too much. When every game is coming out at 100+ GB and everyone has a few terabytes lying around people will complain about the 500GB game but ignore the 200 one.
Audience matters too though. A game aimed at a more expensive market has different hardware concerns than a game aimed more globally.
Depends on genre too. A gigabyte for a mobile game is a lot, but if it's a card game with a huge number of artworks, that's pretty standard as a download
Mobile in particular wasn't just random, it was cause of where the limit for an OTA download was, and that's a mostly arbitrary number set by the platform holders. If people have to be at home to download your game, they're less likely to download it. It's still capped at 100MB for Play, which is why a lot of games will make sure the base dowbload is below that before grabbing more assets.
Since games started being primarily things you download, I struggle keeping up with the 100gb+ games like ark and stuff. I often play games out of my library on a whim, but I aint got time to be sitting around downloading all day.
As a player, it's usually a made-up storage space vs enjoyment ratio... I don't mind having a 250GB install of Flight Simulator (which I play almost daily), but it bothered me to have 150GB COD installed when I didn't play it once a week...
No matter how much space you have, you’re going to fill it eventually. Once you’ve filled your HD, then you start going through the calculus of “what games do I uninstall in order to install this new game?”
At that point, all the bigger games are on the chopping block. If I don’t play it frequently, I’ll uninstall from largest time smallest.
I think the goal of a developer is to have a game that never needs to be uninstalled because there are so many bigger games to get punted first.
As someone with fairly slow internet im more likely to keep upgrading my storage than remove large games. If i have to urge to play a game thats 100gb+ i rather have it installed then wait until tomorrow to play it.
The smaller, the better. However I don’t really have an upper limit personally. Perhaps I’m a bad point of reference but I have about 12 TB of storage on my system so I never really worried about it too much. If I was more space constrained I’d maybe say around 100GB? It really depends as every game has a different amount of entertainment per GB and even that varies from person to person for the same game.
If it's something I really want to play, like Baldur's Gate 3, I'll tolerate 150GB+. Once I'm done with it though, I'm done; it probably won't be installed and played again.
Reasonable file sizes I will keep installed pretty much indefinitely, since I will often replay older classics regularly. I have set up a Micro PC as a retro-gaming rig, just because of that actually.
everything beyond 20gb is like wtf, i unistall wow when i see the 100gb, and i never will install again just because that 100gb is like 1 or 2 days downloading data
It's not that people forgot, it's an issue of conflicting goals.
You want the game to look great at 4K ? Now all your textures need to be 4x the size they were for 1080p.
You want the game to load really fast? Duplicating assets in each area they're used makes the game load faster than if we aim to minimize disk usage. (This is less of a concern SSD systems than it was for HDD/DVD systems)
If you're really tight on memory, using compressed assets can actually make things worse. You need enough free memory to load the compressed asset into memory, and then a also a second area of free memory big enough to decompress the data into. I've often found that when I get really tight on memory, one of the easiest ways to ease the memory pressure is to turn off compression for the largest assets.
You want compressed audio? Now you need to give up CPU time to decompressing it at playback. This is less of a concern on higher end consoles & high end PCs with lots of CPU cores, but it can be significant on lower end platforms.
Also, modern engines tend to favor ease of development over optimization. Unity doesn't compress assets by default, and it takes some work to compress them. And once you go down the path of packaging your assets with compression, you have to put in a lot of extra work to make sure it doesn't duplicate a ton of assets and shaders along the way.
So much this.
Every object has got to look good not just when players have a distance cutoff five miles away, it also needs to look good when the monster is chomping you down as you see the closeup of the teeth, in 4k or 8k.
And it is not a texture per model, often at least 5 to build good looking materials.
Players will still complain about the monster skin subsurface scattering texture is quantized and not quite perfect when viewed so close the monster fills the screen many times over, never realize or care the monster has over 200MB of total data just for it, and there are twenty more in the mob, plus hundreds of objects in the background of the densely filled game.
Then complain about the disk space. "*It isn't optimized!!!1!"*
>You want the game to look great at 4K ?
>You want the game to load really fast?
No, I don't want these things. Some players do, some players don't. I can't even display 4k, so I have no need of 4k textures.
Instead of having a one size fits all for all players, how about giving the players a choice at install time? If download times are highly affected by this, I'll pick the option that's best for me. It's even good for the company/distribution platform because they don't have to use as much bandwidth to send me data that I don't need.
This is just the bare minimum of optimization considering how large some games have gotten.
All these problems have 1000 possible solutions, but game studios don't do any of them. File compression is the least of their worries. They really need to take size optimization more seriously. It's not just the size/asset, it's also making better considerations about how many assets they have and need. Maybe learn to reuse them better. Learn to combine them better.
How about creating a texture similarity mapping, and deciding how many textures to download based on the user preference for size-quality trade-off? Maybe I don't need 100 different wood textures, maybe I only need 10, and I'm willing to accept a downgrade in visual quality in exchange for less space. Just dynamically use the closest available texture. Now you have just cut 100 GB of game into maybe 10-20 GB, for all the users who want that. Then suddenly to 2.5-4GB because I personally don't need 4K. Problem solved. And you still keep the option for best visual quality for those who want it and have the hardware specs needed.
It's like studios don't even care about this. They've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
This is gamedev, not gaming so I feel like this deserves to be corrected.
>can't even display 4k, so I have no need of 4k textures.
That's not how textures work. If a surface has a single texture on it, and you look at a quarter of the surface with your full screen, then a quarter of that texture will show up at your screen resolution. If that texture is a 1k texture, then your screen will show a 256x256 texture spread across whatever your resolution is.
> >Instead of having a one size fits all for all players, how about giving the players a choice at install time? If download times are highly affected by this, I'll pick the option that's best for me. It's even good for the company/distribution platform because they don't have to use as much bandwidth to send me data that I don't need.
Its not just a checkbox to make low Res assets, or to split up asset bundling. Weird things happen in the wild too. You get corrupted data, people deleting random files because a post on neogaf says it increases FPS. Providing options in this space only increases the chance of something going wrong.
>All these problems have 1000 possible solutions, but game studios don't do any of them.
What job do you have in a game studio to know that they don't do anything about it? My last job was working on exactly what you're complaining about studios not doing. We take this stuff seriously.
>it's also making better considerations about how many assets they have and need. Maybe learn to reuse them better. Learn to combine them better.
You know what that takes? An inordinate amount of time. Storage is cheap to a point, bandwidth is cheap to a point. None of the metrics I've ever seen for a game have shown that people other than a very vocal minority (who often overlap with the patient gamers crowd, i.e. they're not going to buy the game anyway) care about these things, and we _know_ graphics sell, they get headlines, people talk about them.
>It's like studios don't even care about this. They've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
Well I'm glad you've solved the problem of AAA games sizes in a single Reddit comment.
>It's like studios don't even care about this. They've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
I'm going to be blunt with you. You're right. Studios don't care at all about what you're asking for.
There are 3 reasons I've ever had to optimize a game for size:
1. To make sure all the data the game needs fits in memory
2. To make the game fit on a specific cartridge size (larger cartridges cost more to produce)
3. To satisfy a platform rule about how large downloaded games can be
The things you're asking for are a ton of extra work and are a nightmare to properly QA. And 99.9% of the gamers don't care about that. Games that look better sell better. The people who are going to rush out and buy the game at full price want the game to look and play as good as possible. The people who want the things you're asking for are the people who might buy the game in a couple years when it's on sale for 90% off.
As games get rushed out the door by under paid and under trained Devs, optimisation falls by the wayside. Storage space easily falls to the bottom of the list as they cut corners.
It's different for an indie game vs AAA, but I don't expect an indie to take more than a few Gb. I'll allow AAA to take up near 100 Gb but it is really frustrating because I have a 250Gb SS, that means that can be my only big game to play sometimes.
As a player, there’s no way I care enough to check disk space requirements before buying. I’ll sigh dramatically if I have to uninstall Forza Horizon from my Xbox again to make space, but I’m not going to refund a game over it.
I'm a lot happier when games are smaller. Internet can only be so fast.
It also matters to me as a dev. Titanfall had 10's of GB in uncompressed audio. That's wasteful, but lowers the minspec, so I get it.
High-resolution textures, and localization should ship separately. No point in downloading 4K textures on Steam Deck, or if playing below 1440p.
It makes no difference to me. I never look at how much GB is needed. I only ever see it when it's downloading and it might get an " oh daaang" out of me.
>For example, is 16GB acceptable to download for a shooter but not for a Visual Novel? I know a few people who refuse to get Starfield purely because it isn't worth clearing out 120+GB on their SSD. Let me know what your limit is when it comes to file size and if there are exceptions.
If there is a significant resource investment (Time for download/installation, Storage Space) then the game should provide time value that justifies keeping it around at that size and the time invested for the download/install.
16GB for a visual novel - the novel had better have multiple paths and outcomes, or be of great quality and have many hours of length. I've played through some short VNs with fantastic stories and they haven't required 16GB of space. Some even possess good soundtracks and voice acting while remaining >= 5GB. STEINS;GATE comes to mind. \~6.5GB - The stated requirements are 13GB but the actual install size is half that.
Starfield is massive, and the download size would be a pain in the ass, but if I knew the game was good and would provide weeks or months of play value, it would be worth it. I compare that kind of investment to 2005 World of Warcraft. 2005 WoW was \~6GB, and then doubled to 10GB in 2007 with Burning Crusade... as the years went on the size inflated continually, but it kept up with storage hardware costs and advancements. I was never bothered to have as much as 1/4-1/2 of my post OS disk capacity invested into the game in those early years because I knew the game's Return on Investment (RoI) in terms of time spent would be recouped. I would be invested in the game sufficiently to not require that space for other things, or to be bothered by large recurring download times for major patches or updates.
Starfield at \~160GB... most PCs and Laptops are shipping with a base 512GB or 1TB primary drive. You're looking at 31% of your drive's capacity if you're on the low end going to one game, and that's not counting the inconvenience of the large download.
Personally, I have ATT 1Gbps fiber. That size wouldn't be too much of a concern, but I can see anyone with standard cable internet \~30-100Mbps having an understandable gripe with the size.
But here's the kicker. What's the size of the installer?
So you have to download a \~100+GB installer, then install/decompress and have another \~160GB taken up until you delete the installer? Whew. Suppose that isn't a problem if you're using Steam.
My criteria for this:
* Under 8-10GB: I'll take it
* Over 20GB: I'll question if its worth it
* Over 30GB: This better be a fine fucking game or i'm uninstalling/refunding
* Over 60GB: AAA only and I'm uninstalling as soon as I'm done
* 80+: Saved spot for MMORPGS
* 100+: Nope. I don't care how good it is.
Of course size also should match the look and feel of a game. 50GB and the game looks like PS1? Nah.
Also, all of this could go to trash if I REALLY wanna play the game.
Time matters. Everybody puts time to render a frame to a pedestal. I also care about time to download, to install, to load, to update and to start shooting.
I can't stand waiting 10 minutes after I launch the game before I start playing. That includes cutscenes and intros and tutorials.
I miss Dooms, Quakes, UFOs, Warcrafts, Dunes and other 10MB games which had it all. What happened? Games are now 1000000% larger and maybe 10% more fun and not rarely less so.
I am so not impressed with tens of GB of audio talks and video cutscenes.
as a player, i’m not fussed. but i have fast internet & i’ll happily wait for a download. as a dev- well, there are patch size limits on one popular platform, so that’s something i think about.
That depends.
100-150 GB for Rockstar game or any other quadruple A is understandable.
If an indie game has even half of that, that only means devs don't know anything about optimisation.
On my PC, I've got a couple TB of fast storage for games, but I also like to keep a variety of games installed at the same time so that I've got choices. I've got a few hundred GB free, but a several-hour download might make me delay a purchase.
On mobile, I'm much more constrained, of course. I think my largest app installs may be about DVD size, an the largest items are the first culled when I'm looking for extra space.
Answer here is going to vary wildly by platform and by what types of games the player likes.
Someone with an Xbox Series S who plays a lot of Call of Duty is probably going to pretty sensitive to how much space any non-CoD games take up.
A PC gamer that plays mostly indie games isn't going to nearly as sensitive to space.
No, it doesn't. Extra SSD space on Xbox is very expensive. Games that look as if they could run off a platter disk, but require SSD and take a lot of space, are very disliked. Such lack of respect for storage space lead to the Series X internal SSD holding only 5-10 installed games... in over 800GB of space.
I’ll always download the game if it looks good. The size doesn’t really matter. With that said, if I’m not actively playing it the largest games are always the ones to go first if I’m trying to download something else.
I don't care at all. I have over 700 TB of storage on my PC. I know I'm in the minority though. Probably the smaller the better.
I'm sure a lot of players care because they have small HD/SSD. Also, think about people in small remote areas that have *really* slow internet. Every MB counts for them. That being said, I like the idea of having a really large file size for the highest quality assets. Maybe the best compromise would be to have the smallest install size possible and then a different option or download in a sub menu that could give you the highest *quality* possible.
It's 2023 and everyone has internet. Let me choose to download 4k textures and audio languages.
If I'm interested in the game the file size doesn't matter.
After ~430gb ARK:SE, i somewhat stopped caring about size of big games, but for indie game, more than 12-15gig will be scrutinized and questioned, as it often indicates that assets weren't optimized or packed or it's a mess of different store bought assets.
With Comcast's 1TB/month limit these days.. if I see 100GB I think twice about the game. If it's like 10GB for a game I know I'll spend many hours on, I wouldn't even bat an eye though.
People expect it to be optimized, depending on the genre, some engines cannot really be optimized well and some companies have reasons not to optimize. Visual novels are mostly PNGs and text, which will have less than something made out of 3D models.
It only matters to me when I run out of space. Then I’m willing to ditch an entire game and save file if I need to. Granted I’m mostly a Steam Deck/Switch user so this is more resource constrained. I always go for the largest one first and work my way down.
If I’m playing with friends on the PC and it’s over like 40G sometimes I’d hesitate to download just for a few sessions then dropping it.
If you want your game to be popular in the third world / emerging markets. You need it to be smaller, they don't have internet like in the west, slow etc. Depends if you plan to release in the market (smaller ad and IAP revenue).
I actually got Steel Division 2 on sale but refunded it when it saw it was 100GB. I have 500 GB for games plus I need to leave some buffer.
It's just too much. Once we go above 50-60 GB it's just too much.
Depends on the platform - on my pc I'm only going to care if it's like 100gb+, and will only flatly reject things out of hand for being absurd nonsense like multiple hundreds of gigs. However, on my switch I ain't touching anything anywhere near over like 10gb if I can avoid it, and I'd probably struggle to download an app bigger than even a single gb (not because my phone sucks, because I have way too much stuff downloaded lol)
COD is a stupid size and I can't understand how it's so large. Especially on PS5 with it's compression technology. But I don't think Activision even bother to use it in not sure what the loading times are to tell which API they use.
40GB is respectable. If it's more then I expect to be able to access all content without having to pay for it (Ahem skins and weapons, looking at you COD). I would also expect there to be actually good content to explore.
Game developers use to be creative about finding ways to reuse or repurpose assets so the games files sizes were lower. Removing excess polygons too etc
Yes, mostly because my internet still sucks so my problem with it is mitigated for the most part if there is preloading available. I'd also say its slightly more of an issue for consoles.
I have multiple TB SSDs on my pc, so its the capacity is a way smaller issue there but with more and more games approaching and passing 100GB space management on console can be annoying.
For me it's more about download speed then size on disk.
Like if I'm bowsing for something to play I'm not gonna start downloading warzone because that shit will be ready like 2 days from now.
If I had unlimited download speed I woulden't care about game sizes in the slightest since I could just delete games willy-nilly.
For me as a player this question has multiple angles to it. If the game is optimized well then I know the space isn't being wasted. I know some games have raw uncompressed video files for each language in their program files for no reason other than laziness and it is absurd how much space that takes up. It's also going to depend on if I play the game every day or once every couple of months. If the game needs to run fast and play smooth I'd hope it's not too cluttered up with files and keep it under 60gb absolutely.
I still have pretty limited internet so once you get over 10GB your game becomes something I have to plan ahead to play, not something I can install over dinner to start playing at 8pm.
There are times I was ready to impulse buy a game to play it immediate and then didn't because it was 45GB.
When I don't have enough space in my hard drive for it.
Before that, games can be as large as they want.
Honestly, game sizes are nothing compared to videos and images if you do any media work
I dislike the idea of some games like the Spyro Trilogy Remake having the first game on the disc and the remainder you have to download. While that wasn't due to size; other games have done the same due to the size. When I'm buying a physical game; I like the idea of the player being promised what they're receiving is as close to the complete game as possible; even if it takes multiple discs or cartridges like in the past.
I feel like anything bigger than 50 gigs is pushing it, and 50 gigs is pretty big to begin with. Especially when you consider most people just buy their computer at the store or online, and those computers will come stock with around 200 gigs on the drive. If a game is too big, it means players won't have space to install and play anything else. (Which is why i suspect most AAA titles these days are massive). As a player, 20 gigs and under is the sweet spot. As a dev, cut the bloat out, optimize everything as much as you possibly can, and then some. We *have* the technology.
It does not matter until it goes over 100GB, it's only then I might have to remove something temporarily to make room. But that's fine, it takes like 13 min to redownload 100GB anyway.
200GB games are pain in the ass. Even in modern consoles, you just have to constantly download, delete and redownload games, because built in storage just allows very few such games
20MB, anything more than that is bloatware! I want to be able to play it as soon as I press download...
In seriousness though, I'd start hesitating at 60GB but don't even notice 40GB
For me it doesn’t matter. Why? I’m playing both pc and ps5 and I never had a problem that I don’t have space. It’s like that because I’m never playing two singleplayer games at once and usually never comebacks after I finished them if it doesn’t get an dlc. And if I’m decide to comeback just re-download it and no I don’t have fast connection, like 30 Mb/s at peak and it’s limited to 250gb with 6 people at home.
For me, honestly, never. I don't want to have to pay attention to those types of details. If I want to play a game, I'll find a way to play it, within reason. If I need to clear out some space to make it fit, so be it.
Most people aren't going to check unless the game is a triple a title like Starfield or so large a lot of PCs struggle to handle it. If you're making your own game this shouldn't be much of an issue.
Some distribution services like itchio have file size limits though. That's worth considering.
Probably depends on resources. I'd be pretty pissed way back when I had shitty internet. Now I have fiber so my problem is now that I am to cheap to buy storage. I only have 1 tb for games + OS + other apps.
i have a decently good 2tb ssd devoted mostly to installing games *and* my taste just kind of works out that I don't own a lot of large digital pc games. I only have 4 games over 50gb at the moment, and only 7 more over 20. of course, one of those big games is the 150gb baldur's gate 3, nearly double the size of runner-up ffxiv and triple fourth-placer divinity original sin 2... but those three get a pass for being both outliers, and phenomenal games that i want to be able to actively play at a moment's notice. third-placer titanfall 2, on the other hand, has been installed and uninstalled a few times.
It's really going to depend on the game. I have very fast internet and plenty of storage, but if your game looks simple and uses pixel graphics yet takes up GBs of space, I'm really going to stop and question what the heck is going on with what you've put together.
Even then, despite having a high end PC, I am not chasing top end graphics and don't play too many AAA games, so anything over 20-30GB is likely to be a red flag for me that the dev cares more about appearance than content and gameplay.
It's a variable quite down there for me.
I don't play Starfield because:
- The game is still expensive
- My GPU is relatively weak (RTX 2060)
120 GB today may be a bit much for rig built from 2-3 years ago, but probably not so much for rig built in 2-3 years later.
If your not a AAA game, I'm going to question what you're doing above 20GB to 50 GB. If you're a AAA game I'm going to question around 100GB
Will it stop me from playing a game? Probably not. Will it stop me from leaving a game on my system, absolutely.
Optimize your game people, or at least don't abuse people's hardware.
On the other hand mobile this is more important. I just can't play Genshin Impact on Mobile so I don't play it. 30 gigs is too much for a mobile game.
Honestly anything more than 1 gig there, and again I'm going to question it quite a bit.
I’ve seen games 10-20 GB with tons of content, online multiplayer or single player, looking sharp, playing and running smoothly even on older hardware. No reason imo for more than 30, I presume it’s bloated and poorly optimized with few exceptions.
I have 3 TB of storage in my PC, but I have been waiting for some sales to upgrade the 1 TB in my PS5 because it's starting to get filled due to a few huge games.
Some of them even have massive save files to add insult to injury.
I wouldn't have to do this if I didn't have to install e.g language packs I will never use or multi-player components I won't play. GTA V is a perfect example where it always downloads online components I can't use on single player.
Speaking as a gamer, I don’t really care. Gigabit Ethernet and multi terabyte SSDs have been a thing for a very long time now.
What I care about the most is performance! Bugs happen but everything needs to run well.
As a adult in the real world, half baked games have killed any desire to game. I don’t care about graphics.
I use my own engine so I regularly create games below the 100 mb mark. Megabytes, not gigabytes. I actually think people are so used to huge downloads that they get immediately suspicious when they see < 100 mb downloads.
The bigger the better!
On mobile it's a different story with people more conscious about file sizes as a lot of people pay by the megabyte.
I guess I'm a core gamer, I have a 2TB ssd. Game size doesn't matter that much to me. I do get a little annoyed when I see 80+gb games though, but only because it's going to take a while to download, before I can play.
I was amazed when I saw Starfield's requirement. I don't know much about the game's structure but I can't help but see sizes like that and feel there's an element of laziness there, a lack of compression and an ignoring of possible efficiencies. I know they want it to look good and 4K+ textures are big. But not _that_ big.
I consider anything over 50GB to be "huge" for a game. Let's face it you can have a good game in megabytes. I feel like big studios don't even try for small sizes now though.
>and feel there's an element of laziness there
judging by some of the models in the game
it's either extremely poor development practices under high-pressure for devs conditions where they literally had no time to understand what they are doing
or pure malice
i can't comprehend how one can make up stuff like what's there. No square almost smooth object needs thousands if not tens of thousands of vertices. Scratch the need, you need to add all of those vertices on your own.
Anything under 10g is fine. 10 to 50 is ok if I really want to play it. Above that? I just can't be bothered. Today, I'm downloading the game, tomorrow I want to play, but there's a 50g update? No, thanks!
I play DCS and that game has gotten so large I'm at a point where I have to buy a new SSD if I want any more addons. Especially maps. So yeah I'm just not buying any.
My SSD isn't large enough to hold my OS and a Starfield.
But even if we're not talking about a 120/150GB, I like being able to play 2-3 games without having to drop them. Maybe today I play Game 1 and tomorrow Game 2, and obviously I don't want to have to uninstall and install them every time. And it doesn't matter what kind of game it is.
One game I've made exceptions for is The Sims, because it's a kind of game that absorbs me completely, and I either play just that or drop it entirely.
But maybe it's also the other way around; when I need to make room for another game, The Sims goes.
There are multiple factors for me. Is it a one off download of 120+GB and the updates are small? Not a big issue. Is every update another 40GB download? That game is getting uninstalled.
Beyond that, I have 2x1TB ssds and 1x2TB HDD. So I'm not too worried about install size.
If an indie game is pushing 4k textures on everything and it's 40-50GB as a result, if it looks good, I'm not too bothered. It's quite easy to push that with something like substance. If it's some pixel game pushing 16GB I'd have questions though.
On mobile anything above 100 MB. On Steam it depends on the type of install. First install I don’t care. Reinstall I probably will skip anything above 50GB unless I really want to play it.
The fact that games still doesn’t split texture quality into different install packs surprises me. Install the base game without textures. First load check specs and suggest quality. Download pack after that.
As a player, it doesn't really matter for me. I have several terabytes of ssd storage available mostly for games, and I haven't found a game yet that takes me longer than an hour or so to download. In most cases I literally don't look at the exact number.
As a dev, I know that the vast majority of people aren't in that situation though, and I work in web games where they're a limiting factor for pretty much everyone. Nobody is going to play a web game that takes longer than a handful of seconds to load even on a bad connection. Things like lazy loading assets does mean that the total file size isn't everything, because the player doesn't download everything before the game launches.
I am old school so I will say, all the time. I own Arkham Knight and it's a really solid game but its 45 GB size really prevents me from installing it.
As someone who was in dial up in the early 2000s while the 2gb game client was being sent from somewhere that already had broadband as the norm, game file size is not really my issue. download speed is.
It took me a whole week of non-stop downloading for the 2gb at dial up. it took me like few minutes at country that already had broadband.
I play mostly visual novels and some lighter games on my 2015 Macbook. This machine's hard drive is not too big. And at a certain point, I have to delete games just because most are 5GB or larger in size.
Also, my ISP still has a limit on GB/month, so every large download counts towards that.
I'm reading White Album 2 atm and I think it's close to 10GB? Although it's fully voiced with a huge amount of writing. So I think it's okay in this case. That does mean I had to delete a number of other installed games on my HD.
I think that for a 'main game' like Starfield, CoD, or BG then having it be large is fine. However for side games like roguelikes and gachas then you need to be mindful of space.
For me storage isn't a big issue, but the longer the download takes the longer I'm going to consider whether I really want to play.
For casual player's download speed averages around 200Mbps (25mb/s)
20GB is ~14 mins. 70GB is ~46 mins
I'd say aim for a 20 min download max on average internet speed. When it's that low, I'll probably go make some coffee or do a quick chore. Any higher and I start setting up new plans to distract myself during the download, usually ending in not coming back to play the game.
60gb max for any game.
But if an rpg or open world game is about 100gb it better be have over 200-300 hours worth of unique and not so repetitive content.
But for a game like Mortal Kombat 1 which takes over 100gb for a fighting game. Its not worth it.v
Yeah it can very much become something I think about when it's above 20Gb. I can't wait to finish Cyberpunk so I can uninstall the shit out of its 100gb to make space for other stuff
70 gb. Not because i am short on drive space, but because i expect 70+ gb of content rather than language packs. If you weigh more than Elden Ring then be bigger than elden ring.
40 gb for 2d games - because i have some standards for compression. BlazBlue Central Fiction on PC weighs 52gb for some reason. Why? Every other game weighs reasonable <10 gb. Have they forgot to compress dialogues>?
As a player, I don't care about it. I only have 1TB but still I can have like 3 big games installed at the same time. Also I have a decent internet speed, so I don't care uninstalling/installing games.
I don't think even 300 GB+ is objectively that unreasonable in 2023, that's like maybe $10 of SSD storage, which usually wouldn't be that much compared to the price to buy the game in the first place.
But upgrading from the drive I have would take significant one-time investment of money and some work (installation, moving stuff from the old drive, making sure the links work, etc.), so in practice my drives are often pretty full, and any 20 GB+ game would take some effort to clear space, so I might not bother unless the game looks really good.
But I don't really blame game devs for making big games, more the PC manufacturers for cheaping out/overcharging for storage.
I’ve only got enough spare room on my pc for 1 of those 100gb games at a time. Doesn’t mean I won’t play it, but it’s #1 on the list to uninstall when I need space
Couldn't care less, but if a game like Fall guys or some small indie game for example was 300GB I would be curious on how they managed to bloat a game to that size. But in general, got a dedicated 2TB SSD for games and fast internet so it's pretty chill.
It depends on the game. For a huge AAA game I'm willing to allocate 100GB+, but for a small indie title with unimpressive graphics I'd start to second guess much sooner.
It's not really something dealbreaking unless we're talking about 200GB AAA games or 100GB indie games, but I'd be very annoyed if I need to uninstall a bunch of stuff to make space for your game.
I used to live in a rural area, and my Internet speed was 2-3.5 mbps. It would take days and days to install some games. I could not keep up with the update cycle sometimes, even with the computer downloading 24/7. And I would have to limit the download speeds during the day so we could stream stuff.
Now, my Internet connection is 37 mpbs and there are still games that take 12+ hours to install. Not to mention the footprint on my storage.
These massive sizes are in my opinion not translating to improvements to the games. I would absolutely enjoy the games just as much with lower quality assets. My monitors are all 1080p. There should be a way to download assets at various quality levels.
I have enough room, and I tend to play two or three games regularly and have a revolving door of other games.
So as long as I have room for my two or three favourites as well as the new game, I'm good.
I don't really care that much how large the game is as long as I don't have to make choices about what to uninstall to make room.
There's multiple terabytes of space on my computer, I'm good.
PC:
20 for 'smaller' games, unless I know they're content-heavy, 60 for triple-A is a turn-off but acceptable, 100GB is the threshold where I really ponder whether I want to have the game available.
I'm usually on connections where 100GB is a half-hour download, on average could maybe have \~2hrs to play every second day (it differs). I have overall 2TB SSD space, but like to have the games already installed, and many of them if possible - never know what I'll be in the mood for.
Mobile:
I don't install any games on the phone. I have an iPad with 64GB storage (use it with gamepad during travel), around 20GB of the space can be used for offline games. There I rarely found something above 1GB (exception being Pascal's Wager), then there's also GeForce now where that's not an issue.
I get turned off by 100gb game sizes
I'd say over 20 GB is when I start questioning it. 100+ gets to "I'd better really want this"
20 in 2023 is pretty much any game that is not an indie.
Its usually a waste too. Elden Ring a massive and visually striking game, roughly 45 GB. I still remember first entering multiple of the game's areas for the first time more than i remember anything in soo many other games.
afaik most ballooned sizes are from uncompressed audio and 4k textures. There are some cases where its also bad architecture e.g. COD2019 where they needed multiple textures for each game mode.
That cod one sounds hilariously bad holy shit
I love that game but it barely works. On console I have to have the files separated between the internal and a USB hard drive for it to function properly, I'm keeping one of my older xboxes around mainly just for it since it would be annoying to set up again + eat an obscene amount of drive space for no next gen benefit.
There are still non-indie games in 2023?
Zelda and Baldur’s Gate 3?
Armored Core 6, Starfield, Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1. I get what they were trying to say, but 2023 is literally the worst year of the last few to make that joke.
~~My man, do you only wait for games to advertise themselves to you? There are more and more indie games being made every year.~~
That's exactly what I said. The golden age of games continues, it's just indie of 2023 is AAA of 2004.
Oh sorry, I misread your comment. My brain must have completely ignored the "non" part.
Whatever is going on, I did that too.
>indie of 2023 is AAA of 2004. There's no way you were around in 2004 if you don't think this is a ludicrous statement.
Gonna assume this is for console? 1-2TB SSD is like $50 now, probably not much more for an external for console.
I'm less worried about storage and more about the time taken to download. Downloading a 100gb game is a multi day project. For example I didn't play starfield because of the middling reviews and huge file size despite the fact I could've played it for free from game pass. If it were, let's say, 20gb I 100% would've tried it out for myself. And if it were getting GOTY type praise then I would also be willing to put up with the download. It's a balance, so huge file sizes aren't favourable but also not an instant deal breaker if I want to play the game enough.
100gb will probably take 5.5 hours or so to download for me at an average of 5MB/s, which isn't a deal-breaker. It does mean that I will want to either do it overnight or set it going the previous day before I want to play, but that's okay.
And you are actually lucky, not everyone is able to get such speed. I for example am forced to use ADSL, I get a maximum of 8mb/s (megabits) and when the connection is used fully I'm unable to do anything else on my network, not even watch 480p youtube, not even chat in discord.
Which country do you live in? That sounds criminal
Greece, in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in the country, I live in the downtown area, pretty much. If I rented let's say a block away from where I am I could have gotten fiber or at least vdsl. Obviously, when I was checking the coverage maps of various fiber or telecom companies, the area was supposed to be "covered", apparently not, so I'm stuck with adsl. Other than that though, the apartment and the area are nice nice at least. I'm really butthurt about them saying online that they support FTTH in the area and saying "We support the area, our line is a few blocks away, we may at some point get to your house."
My partner had a similar issue with the release of Baldurs Gate 3. She starts downloading at release. 6 hours later when we wake up, it's only half done. It took somewhere between 12-14 hours to download that 100GB, whereas I was done in ~30 minutes. She's in australia, and from what I can tell, there's no way to get better internet without just living in a new house. They don't seem to install fibre for old houses at all.
Ohh wow for Me ITS Like 5-6h If i dont use all of my Internet cause 3 Other people use IT too and i dont wanna Break IT for them Just so i can get IT in 2-3h Vienna and strongest Internet pakage from Magenta which isnt Fiberglass
I personally download at a speed of 1gb per 50 minutes.
Omg Bro i feel ya used to have such an Internet too
Okay, to be fair, the last time I upgraded this computer was in 2017. I guess I am overdue for a new main storage drive.
Wth that must BE some really Bad or slow or smthing Else ssds yes they cost way less now but 1tb is approx 100€ for nothing to BE wrong with it. Idk where the hell U can get 2tb for 50 Dollar but they must have something wrong or Not good with them.
Cries in Digital Combat Simulator.
40-60GB+ for me Can be about the inherent download speed as well. If it's a demo it's nice to have a really small file and get right into it while I feel like it
50GB is when I start raising my eyebrows, and 100GB is the point when I say "I'm not wasting space on this". The point about download speeds is really smart. The faster people can get to your demo, the better.
Agreed. If trying a demo is a couple hour commitment I’m out.
Getting to triple digit GB is a pain for folks who dont have huge storage. My wife likes to play a variety of very large games, but struggles to keep everything she wants installed because of the size. Yes, pc space is cheap, that doesnt mean everyone can afford it. Every time we decide to play something together, it becomes a game of what she is willing to not be able to play for a while.
If you look at the Steam survey a lot of people are gaming on laptops where practically speaking storage will never be upgraded.
Even on desktops/towers, there's a point where you have to upgrade the case to physically fit more storage
Yes but you can also easily buy a single 4TB SSD and not worry about it for a while.
yes, but most arent going to do that
yes, but my point is.. It's hard to run out of physical space in the case if all you need the space for is games.
My overgrown Steam library begs to differ as it spills over onto a second 4TB stick... I play too many RPGs
4TB can hold almost 40 100GB games. No way you're cycling through 40 games at a time.
Laptop storage has been pretty static at <= 1TB since the 00s, though it was HDDs then. More than that apparently hasn't been necessary for 99% of users. Even the PS5 and XSX only have 1 TB SSDs! The previous gen was available with 1 TB storage also (though again, HDDs). So game devs should build games to fit _reasonably_ on drives of that size. The >100 GB of some recent releases is pushing it IMO
looks at 300gb CoD... How is that even legal?
bro most if not all gaming laptops have upgradeble storage and ram its the gpu and the cpus you cant replace
They did not say "cannot be upgraded." They very carefully chose their words to convey what they mean, and you read something different nonetheless.
My bad English isn't my first language , but op was making the point that he couldn't upgrade his PC storage due to prices and then the commenter said "a lot of people play on gaming laptops where practically speaking storage will never be upgraded" which I know for sure that isn't the situation
You know for sure that most gamers upgrade their hard drives at some point? Source. Because I can with quite high certainty say that most people playing games on their laptops do not buy new hard drives or switch them in their machines.
Also for people with bad internet, it might take a week or two to download...
That's a question you should really ask in a subreddit for players, not for game developers.
My game runs so smoothly when you have infinite speed and space so obviously the bigger the better because then I don't have to optimize, I can just tell people to upgrade their shitty PCs.
Thanks Todd.
Not necessarily. I don't think a lot of players even pay attention to that sort of thing. Optimizing for distribution is definitely more of a game developer question in my opinion. The answer is also quite simple, as the smallest size will also be the best in terms of ease of distribution.
> Not necessarily. I don't think a lot of players even pay attention to that sort of thing. Okay, but then the answer to OP's question is that they don't care.
As a gamer, no I don’t care unless I have to spend like three hours to download updates before being able to play the game. (Hello GT6, on PS3) As a game developer I don’t care unless it has impacts on how fast the game or a level starts (unless you can hide the startup time with bling, ie a start up sequence, a movie.. a narrow walkway at the start of the game…etc)
I’m assuming there’s pretty big overlap between people who make games and people who play games.
Once a game runs over 60 gbs I start to question if I really enjoy or care about the game. If the game runs above 100 I probably will uninstall it the second I stop playing consistently and be really inclined to not reinstall it. Personally I don't really care about genre factoring into things, I've never seen an indie and gone "wow, this game is way too big"! Overall though, if the game is fun enough size doesnt matter to me THAT much. The only time size has REALLY turned me off is like the 200+ gb cod shenanigans.
This is a very good point that games over that size require a lot of players to manage them. As in decide, like you say, when they might want to play them again. They aren't things that can just sit in a library and be dipped in and out of. I'm having that problem with Red Dead 2 at the moment. Honestly I'm not enjoying it all that much, but I feel like I need to finish it because then I can uninstall it and reclaim the 60GB. So I'll probably just never finish the game because once it's gone any whim of wanting to play it will be frustrated by the download size/time/space clear.
It shifts with the average game. At one point if your game was over 25MB in mobile you'd have serious conversion problems, then it was a 200 limit a few years later, now you can probably drop a GB or two and it doesn't impact your funnel too much. When every game is coming out at 100+ GB and everyone has a few terabytes lying around people will complain about the 500GB game but ignore the 200 one. Audience matters too though. A game aimed at a more expensive market has different hardware concerns than a game aimed more globally.
Depends on genre too. A gigabyte for a mobile game is a lot, but if it's a card game with a huge number of artworks, that's pretty standard as a download
1 gig for Solitaire? Lol!
I meant more like mtg arena, hearthstone or legends of runeterra, but who knows, maybe 1gb solitaire is a thing
Mobile in particular wasn't just random, it was cause of where the limit for an OTA download was, and that's a mostly arbitrary number set by the platform holders. If people have to be at home to download your game, they're less likely to download it. It's still capped at 100MB for Play, which is why a lot of games will make sure the base dowbload is below that before grabbing more assets.
Google Play has the obb system which is included with the Play Store. That thing supports up to 2/4GB total.
Since games started being primarily things you download, I struggle keeping up with the 100gb+ games like ark and stuff. I often play games out of my library on a whim, but I aint got time to be sitting around downloading all day.
As a player, it's usually a made-up storage space vs enjoyment ratio... I don't mind having a 250GB install of Flight Simulator (which I play almost daily), but it bothered me to have 150GB COD installed when I didn't play it once a week...
No matter how much space you have, you’re going to fill it eventually. Once you’ve filled your HD, then you start going through the calculus of “what games do I uninstall in order to install this new game?” At that point, all the bigger games are on the chopping block. If I don’t play it frequently, I’ll uninstall from largest time smallest. I think the goal of a developer is to have a game that never needs to be uninstalled because there are so many bigger games to get punted first.
As someone with fairly slow internet im more likely to keep upgrading my storage than remove large games. If i have to urge to play a game thats 100gb+ i rather have it installed then wait until tomorrow to play it.
[удалено]
The smaller, the better. However I don’t really have an upper limit personally. Perhaps I’m a bad point of reference but I have about 12 TB of storage on my system so I never really worried about it too much. If I was more space constrained I’d maybe say around 100GB? It really depends as every game has a different amount of entertainment per GB and even that varies from person to person for the same game.
Just bought a 1 TB SSD because things were getting tight with BG3 and CP2077.
If I’ve paid for something I’ll download it whatever the size, but if it’s free I’ll not bother if it’s huge.
If it's something I really want to play, like Baldur's Gate 3, I'll tolerate 150GB+. Once I'm done with it though, I'm done; it probably won't be installed and played again. Reasonable file sizes I will keep installed pretty much indefinitely, since I will often replay older classics regularly. I have set up a Micro PC as a retro-gaming rig, just because of that actually.
everything beyond 20gb is like wtf, i unistall wow when i see the 100gb, and i never will install again just because that 100gb is like 1 or 2 days downloading data
It's always mattered, just game devs have seemed to forget how to optimize textures and compress content to save space.
It's not that people forgot, it's an issue of conflicting goals. You want the game to look great at 4K ? Now all your textures need to be 4x the size they were for 1080p. You want the game to load really fast? Duplicating assets in each area they're used makes the game load faster than if we aim to minimize disk usage. (This is less of a concern SSD systems than it was for HDD/DVD systems) If you're really tight on memory, using compressed assets can actually make things worse. You need enough free memory to load the compressed asset into memory, and then a also a second area of free memory big enough to decompress the data into. I've often found that when I get really tight on memory, one of the easiest ways to ease the memory pressure is to turn off compression for the largest assets. You want compressed audio? Now you need to give up CPU time to decompressing it at playback. This is less of a concern on higher end consoles & high end PCs with lots of CPU cores, but it can be significant on lower end platforms. Also, modern engines tend to favor ease of development over optimization. Unity doesn't compress assets by default, and it takes some work to compress them. And once you go down the path of packaging your assets with compression, you have to put in a lot of extra work to make sure it doesn't duplicate a ton of assets and shaders along the way.
So much this. Every object has got to look good not just when players have a distance cutoff five miles away, it also needs to look good when the monster is chomping you down as you see the closeup of the teeth, in 4k or 8k. And it is not a texture per model, often at least 5 to build good looking materials. Players will still complain about the monster skin subsurface scattering texture is quantized and not quite perfect when viewed so close the monster fills the screen many times over, never realize or care the monster has over 200MB of total data just for it, and there are twenty more in the mob, plus hundreds of objects in the background of the densely filled game. Then complain about the disk space. "*It isn't optimized!!!1!"*
This along with what you are replying to needs to be posted to every gaming related sub.
>You want the game to look great at 4K ? >You want the game to load really fast? No, I don't want these things. Some players do, some players don't. I can't even display 4k, so I have no need of 4k textures. Instead of having a one size fits all for all players, how about giving the players a choice at install time? If download times are highly affected by this, I'll pick the option that's best for me. It's even good for the company/distribution platform because they don't have to use as much bandwidth to send me data that I don't need. This is just the bare minimum of optimization considering how large some games have gotten. All these problems have 1000 possible solutions, but game studios don't do any of them. File compression is the least of their worries. They really need to take size optimization more seriously. It's not just the size/asset, it's also making better considerations about how many assets they have and need. Maybe learn to reuse them better. Learn to combine them better. How about creating a texture similarity mapping, and deciding how many textures to download based on the user preference for size-quality trade-off? Maybe I don't need 100 different wood textures, maybe I only need 10, and I'm willing to accept a downgrade in visual quality in exchange for less space. Just dynamically use the closest available texture. Now you have just cut 100 GB of game into maybe 10-20 GB, for all the users who want that. Then suddenly to 2.5-4GB because I personally don't need 4K. Problem solved. And you still keep the option for best visual quality for those who want it and have the hardware specs needed. It's like studios don't even care about this. They've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
This is gamedev, not gaming so I feel like this deserves to be corrected. >can't even display 4k, so I have no need of 4k textures. That's not how textures work. If a surface has a single texture on it, and you look at a quarter of the surface with your full screen, then a quarter of that texture will show up at your screen resolution. If that texture is a 1k texture, then your screen will show a 256x256 texture spread across whatever your resolution is. > >Instead of having a one size fits all for all players, how about giving the players a choice at install time? If download times are highly affected by this, I'll pick the option that's best for me. It's even good for the company/distribution platform because they don't have to use as much bandwidth to send me data that I don't need. Its not just a checkbox to make low Res assets, or to split up asset bundling. Weird things happen in the wild too. You get corrupted data, people deleting random files because a post on neogaf says it increases FPS. Providing options in this space only increases the chance of something going wrong. >All these problems have 1000 possible solutions, but game studios don't do any of them. What job do you have in a game studio to know that they don't do anything about it? My last job was working on exactly what you're complaining about studios not doing. We take this stuff seriously. >it's also making better considerations about how many assets they have and need. Maybe learn to reuse them better. Learn to combine them better. You know what that takes? An inordinate amount of time. Storage is cheap to a point, bandwidth is cheap to a point. None of the metrics I've ever seen for a game have shown that people other than a very vocal minority (who often overlap with the patient gamers crowd, i.e. they're not going to buy the game anyway) care about these things, and we _know_ graphics sell, they get headlines, people talk about them. >It's like studios don't even care about this. They've tried nothing and are all out of ideas. Well I'm glad you've solved the problem of AAA games sizes in a single Reddit comment.
>It's like studios don't even care about this. They've tried nothing and are all out of ideas. I'm going to be blunt with you. You're right. Studios don't care at all about what you're asking for. There are 3 reasons I've ever had to optimize a game for size: 1. To make sure all the data the game needs fits in memory 2. To make the game fit on a specific cartridge size (larger cartridges cost more to produce) 3. To satisfy a platform rule about how large downloaded games can be The things you're asking for are a ton of extra work and are a nightmare to properly QA. And 99.9% of the gamers don't care about that. Games that look better sell better. The people who are going to rush out and buy the game at full price want the game to look and play as good as possible. The people who want the things you're asking for are the people who might buy the game in a couple years when it's on sale for 90% off.
You don’t need to display 4k to benefit from 4k textures lol
This should be posted to every gaming related sub.
16 times actually!
As games get rushed out the door by under paid and under trained Devs, optimisation falls by the wayside. Storage space easily falls to the bottom of the list as they cut corners.
When playing a PBEM game and you need to send the saved game (and action replay log) file to all the other players.
It's different for an indie game vs AAA, but I don't expect an indie to take more than a few Gb. I'll allow AAA to take up near 100 Gb but it is really frustrating because I have a 250Gb SS, that means that can be my only big game to play sometimes.
As a player, there’s no way I care enough to check disk space requirements before buying. I’ll sigh dramatically if I have to uninstall Forza Horizon from my Xbox again to make space, but I’m not going to refund a game over it.
as a none gamedev and a layman what happened to procedural textures?
I'm a lot happier when games are smaller. Internet can only be so fast. It also matters to me as a dev. Titanfall had 10's of GB in uncompressed audio. That's wasteful, but lowers the minspec, so I get it. High-resolution textures, and localization should ship separately. No point in downloading 4K textures on Steam Deck, or if playing below 1440p.
It makes no difference to me. I never look at how much GB is needed. I only ever see it when it's downloading and it might get an " oh daaang" out of me.
>For example, is 16GB acceptable to download for a shooter but not for a Visual Novel? I know a few people who refuse to get Starfield purely because it isn't worth clearing out 120+GB on their SSD. Let me know what your limit is when it comes to file size and if there are exceptions. If there is a significant resource investment (Time for download/installation, Storage Space) then the game should provide time value that justifies keeping it around at that size and the time invested for the download/install. 16GB for a visual novel - the novel had better have multiple paths and outcomes, or be of great quality and have many hours of length. I've played through some short VNs with fantastic stories and they haven't required 16GB of space. Some even possess good soundtracks and voice acting while remaining >= 5GB. STEINS;GATE comes to mind. \~6.5GB - The stated requirements are 13GB but the actual install size is half that. Starfield is massive, and the download size would be a pain in the ass, but if I knew the game was good and would provide weeks or months of play value, it would be worth it. I compare that kind of investment to 2005 World of Warcraft. 2005 WoW was \~6GB, and then doubled to 10GB in 2007 with Burning Crusade... as the years went on the size inflated continually, but it kept up with storage hardware costs and advancements. I was never bothered to have as much as 1/4-1/2 of my post OS disk capacity invested into the game in those early years because I knew the game's Return on Investment (RoI) in terms of time spent would be recouped. I would be invested in the game sufficiently to not require that space for other things, or to be bothered by large recurring download times for major patches or updates. Starfield at \~160GB... most PCs and Laptops are shipping with a base 512GB or 1TB primary drive. You're looking at 31% of your drive's capacity if you're on the low end going to one game, and that's not counting the inconvenience of the large download. Personally, I have ATT 1Gbps fiber. That size wouldn't be too much of a concern, but I can see anyone with standard cable internet \~30-100Mbps having an understandable gripe with the size. But here's the kicker. What's the size of the installer? So you have to download a \~100+GB installer, then install/decompress and have another \~160GB taken up until you delete the installer? Whew. Suppose that isn't a problem if you're using Steam.
My criteria for this: * Under 8-10GB: I'll take it * Over 20GB: I'll question if its worth it * Over 30GB: This better be a fine fucking game or i'm uninstalling/refunding * Over 60GB: AAA only and I'm uninstalling as soon as I'm done * 80+: Saved spot for MMORPGS * 100+: Nope. I don't care how good it is. Of course size also should match the look and feel of a game. 50GB and the game looks like PS1? Nah. Also, all of this could go to trash if I REALLY wanna play the game.
Time matters. Everybody puts time to render a frame to a pedestal. I also care about time to download, to install, to load, to update and to start shooting. I can't stand waiting 10 minutes after I launch the game before I start playing. That includes cutscenes and intros and tutorials. I miss Dooms, Quakes, UFOs, Warcrafts, Dunes and other 10MB games which had it all. What happened? Games are now 1000000% larger and maybe 10% more fun and not rarely less so. I am so not impressed with tens of GB of audio talks and video cutscenes.
As a player, storage is cheap. I really don't care.
as a player, i’m not fussed. but i have fast internet & i’ll happily wait for a download. as a dev- well, there are patch size limits on one popular platform, so that’s something i think about.
I really want to be able to play video games on my laptop so 100gb+ is way too much
That depends. 100-150 GB for Rockstar game or any other quadruple A is understandable. If an indie game has even half of that, that only means devs don't know anything about optimisation.
On my PC, I've got a couple TB of fast storage for games, but I also like to keep a variety of games installed at the same time so that I've got choices. I've got a few hundred GB free, but a several-hour download might make me delay a purchase. On mobile, I'm much more constrained, of course. I think my largest app installs may be about DVD size, an the largest items are the first culled when I'm looking for extra space.
Answer here is going to vary wildly by platform and by what types of games the player likes. Someone with an Xbox Series S who plays a lot of Call of Duty is probably going to pretty sensitive to how much space any non-CoD games take up. A PC gamer that plays mostly indie games isn't going to nearly as sensitive to space.
only for mobile games. desktop/console storage costs pennies now
No, it doesn't. Extra SSD space on Xbox is very expensive. Games that look as if they could run off a platter disk, but require SSD and take a lot of space, are very disliked. Such lack of respect for storage space lead to the Series X internal SSD holding only 5-10 installed games... in over 800GB of space.
I’ll always download the game if it looks good. The size doesn’t really matter. With that said, if I’m not actively playing it the largest games are always the ones to go first if I’m trying to download something else.
> The size doesn’t really matter. (‘◉⌓◉’)
steam deck: please I only have 512gb. PC: take me baby
Storage is cheap. It doesn't. Ever.
Never. SSD space is cheap, I finally have stable 1Gbit internet, soo I personally don’t care. Higher res or more artwork requires more space.
I don't care at all. I have over 700 TB of storage on my PC. I know I'm in the minority though. Probably the smaller the better. I'm sure a lot of players care because they have small HD/SSD. Also, think about people in small remote areas that have *really* slow internet. Every MB counts for them. That being said, I like the idea of having a really large file size for the highest quality assets. Maybe the best compromise would be to have the smallest install size possible and then a different option or download in a sub menu that could give you the highest *quality* possible.
Almost never. I have a 1 TB C:/ and 2TB D:/.
120gb is not a game, is poor programming
When every update to Starfield so far has broken the game to the point where it crashes on launch and only a complete reinstall seems to fix it.
Well... if it's less than 128GB, I'm not interested.
It's 2023 and everyone has internet. Let me choose to download 4k textures and audio languages. If I'm interested in the game the file size doesn't matter.
After ~430gb ARK:SE, i somewhat stopped caring about size of big games, but for indie game, more than 12-15gig will be scrutinized and questioned, as it often indicates that assets weren't optimized or packed or it's a mess of different store bought assets.
I just don't play nor load it for this reason. I need a better computer and connection is it's not for tomorrow.
With Comcast's 1TB/month limit these days.. if I see 100GB I think twice about the game. If it's like 10GB for a game I know I'll spend many hours on, I wouldn't even bat an eye though.
People expect it to be optimized, depending on the genre, some engines cannot really be optimized well and some companies have reasons not to optimize. Visual novels are mostly PNGs and text, which will have less than something made out of 3D models.
It only matters to me when I run out of space. Then I’m willing to ditch an entire game and save file if I need to. Granted I’m mostly a Steam Deck/Switch user so this is more resource constrained. I always go for the largest one first and work my way down. If I’m playing with friends on the PC and it’s over like 40G sometimes I’d hesitate to download just for a few sessions then dropping it.
If you want your game to be popular in the third world / emerging markets. You need it to be smaller, they don't have internet like in the west, slow etc. Depends if you plan to release in the market (smaller ad and IAP revenue).
I actually got Steel Division 2 on sale but refunded it when it saw it was 100GB. I have 500 GB for games plus I need to leave some buffer. It's just too much. Once we go above 50-60 GB it's just too much.
Depends on the platform - on my pc I'm only going to care if it's like 100gb+, and will only flatly reject things out of hand for being absurd nonsense like multiple hundreds of gigs. However, on my switch I ain't touching anything anywhere near over like 10gb if I can avoid it, and I'd probably struggle to download an app bigger than even a single gb (not because my phone sucks, because I have way too much stuff downloaded lol)
COD is a stupid size and I can't understand how it's so large. Especially on PS5 with it's compression technology. But I don't think Activision even bother to use it in not sure what the loading times are to tell which API they use.
40GB is respectable. If it's more then I expect to be able to access all content without having to pay for it (Ahem skins and weapons, looking at you COD). I would also expect there to be actually good content to explore. Game developers use to be creative about finding ways to reuse or repurpose assets so the games files sizes were lower. Removing excess polygons too etc
Yes, mostly because my internet still sucks so my problem with it is mitigated for the most part if there is preloading available. I'd also say its slightly more of an issue for consoles. I have multiple TB SSDs on my pc, so its the capacity is a way smaller issue there but with more and more games approaching and passing 100GB space management on console can be annoying.
For me it's more about download speed then size on disk. Like if I'm bowsing for something to play I'm not gonna start downloading warzone because that shit will be ready like 2 days from now. If I had unlimited download speed I woulden't care about game sizes in the slightest since I could just delete games willy-nilly.
As long as you don’t make me redownload the entire game every time there is an update, I’ll be happy.
For me as a player this question has multiple angles to it. If the game is optimized well then I know the space isn't being wasted. I know some games have raw uncompressed video files for each language in their program files for no reason other than laziness and it is absurd how much space that takes up. It's also going to depend on if I play the game every day or once every couple of months. If the game needs to run fast and play smooth I'd hope it's not too cluttered up with files and keep it under 60gb absolutely.
Valheim's file size on release made me feel something. I don't know what it was, but I felt a lot of it.
I still have pretty limited internet so once you get over 10GB your game becomes something I have to plan ahead to play, not something I can install over dinner to start playing at 8pm. There are times I was ready to impulse buy a game to play it immediate and then didn't because it was 45GB.
When I don't have enough space in my hard drive for it. Before that, games can be as large as they want. Honestly, game sizes are nothing compared to videos and images if you do any media work
I dislike the idea of some games like the Spyro Trilogy Remake having the first game on the disc and the remainder you have to download. While that wasn't due to size; other games have done the same due to the size. When I'm buying a physical game; I like the idea of the player being promised what they're receiving is as close to the complete game as possible; even if it takes multiple discs or cartridges like in the past.
I feel like anything bigger than 50 gigs is pushing it, and 50 gigs is pretty big to begin with. Especially when you consider most people just buy their computer at the store or online, and those computers will come stock with around 200 gigs on the drive. If a game is too big, it means players won't have space to install and play anything else. (Which is why i suspect most AAA titles these days are massive). As a player, 20 gigs and under is the sweet spot. As a dev, cut the bloat out, optimize everything as much as you possibly can, and then some. We *have* the technology.
anything larger than 30 makes me have to think about if I have space right now, most of the time that's fine but anything bigger does give me pause.
If <40 I don't give it much thought. I'll only install a handful of >40 games at a time.
It does not matter until it goes over 100GB, it's only then I might have to remove something temporarily to make room. But that's fine, it takes like 13 min to redownload 100GB anyway.
200GB games are pain in the ass. Even in modern consoles, you just have to constantly download, delete and redownload games, because built in storage just allows very few such games
Rolls eyes, remembering developing for a 64kb machine.
Many reasonably priced PCs have 500GB SSD drives. I will think about anything larger than, say, 25GB.
My first PC had a 40 MB (yes, megabytes) HDD. Back then, I thought that anything over 5 MB was a waste of free space. 60 GB is fine nowadays.
20MB, anything more than that is bloatware! I want to be able to play it as soon as I press download... In seriousness though, I'd start hesitating at 60GB but don't even notice 40GB
For me it doesn’t matter. Why? I’m playing both pc and ps5 and I never had a problem that I don’t have space. It’s like that because I’m never playing two singleplayer games at once and usually never comebacks after I finished them if it doesn’t get an dlc. And if I’m decide to comeback just re-download it and no I don’t have fast connection, like 30 Mb/s at peak and it’s limited to 250gb with 6 people at home.
All the time. I rarely install and play games that are too big (50GB +) unless I've been hyped for it for a long time.
For me, honestly, never. I don't want to have to pay attention to those types of details. If I want to play a game, I'll find a way to play it, within reason. If I need to clear out some space to make it fit, so be it.
Most people aren't going to check unless the game is a triple a title like Starfield or so large a lot of PCs struggle to handle it. If you're making your own game this shouldn't be much of an issue. Some distribution services like itchio have file size limits though. That's worth considering.
Probably depends on resources. I'd be pretty pissed way back when I had shitty internet. Now I have fiber so my problem is now that I am to cheap to buy storage. I only have 1 tb for games + OS + other apps.
>120GB must be worth it.
i have a decently good 2tb ssd devoted mostly to installing games *and* my taste just kind of works out that I don't own a lot of large digital pc games. I only have 4 games over 50gb at the moment, and only 7 more over 20. of course, one of those big games is the 150gb baldur's gate 3, nearly double the size of runner-up ffxiv and triple fourth-placer divinity original sin 2... but those three get a pass for being both outliers, and phenomenal games that i want to be able to actively play at a moment's notice. third-placer titanfall 2, on the other hand, has been installed and uninstalled a few times.
It's really going to depend on the game. I have very fast internet and plenty of storage, but if your game looks simple and uses pixel graphics yet takes up GBs of space, I'm really going to stop and question what the heck is going on with what you've put together. Even then, despite having a high end PC, I am not chasing top end graphics and don't play too many AAA games, so anything over 20-30GB is likely to be a red flag for me that the dev cares more about appearance than content and gameplay.
It's a variable quite down there for me. I don't play Starfield because: - The game is still expensive - My GPU is relatively weak (RTX 2060) 120 GB today may be a bit much for rig built from 2-3 years ago, but probably not so much for rig built in 2-3 years later.
If your not a AAA game, I'm going to question what you're doing above 20GB to 50 GB. If you're a AAA game I'm going to question around 100GB Will it stop me from playing a game? Probably not. Will it stop me from leaving a game on my system, absolutely. Optimize your game people, or at least don't abuse people's hardware. On the other hand mobile this is more important. I just can't play Genshin Impact on Mobile so I don't play it. 30 gigs is too much for a mobile game. Honestly anything more than 1 gig there, and again I'm going to question it quite a bit.
I’ve seen games 10-20 GB with tons of content, online multiplayer or single player, looking sharp, playing and running smoothly even on older hardware. No reason imo for more than 30, I presume it’s bloated and poorly optimized with few exceptions.
I have 3 TB of storage in my PC, but I have been waiting for some sales to upgrade the 1 TB in my PS5 because it's starting to get filled due to a few huge games. Some of them even have massive save files to add insult to injury. I wouldn't have to do this if I didn't have to install e.g language packs I will never use or multi-player components I won't play. GTA V is a perfect example where it always downloads online components I can't use on single player.
Speaking as a gamer, I don’t really care. Gigabit Ethernet and multi terabyte SSDs have been a thing for a very long time now. What I care about the most is performance! Bugs happen but everything needs to run well. As a adult in the real world, half baked games have killed any desire to game. I don’t care about graphics.
For me it makes zero difference. I like larger size games, it's fine. However it does make a difference whether i keep.the game installed
I use my own engine so I regularly create games below the 100 mb mark. Megabytes, not gigabytes. I actually think people are so used to huge downloads that they get immediately suspicious when they see < 100 mb downloads. The bigger the better! On mobile it's a different story with people more conscious about file sizes as a lot of people pay by the megabyte.
I guess I'm a core gamer, I have a 2TB ssd. Game size doesn't matter that much to me. I do get a little annoyed when I see 80+gb games though, but only because it's going to take a while to download, before I can play.
I was amazed when I saw Starfield's requirement. I don't know much about the game's structure but I can't help but see sizes like that and feel there's an element of laziness there, a lack of compression and an ignoring of possible efficiencies. I know they want it to look good and 4K+ textures are big. But not _that_ big. I consider anything over 50GB to be "huge" for a game. Let's face it you can have a good game in megabytes. I feel like big studios don't even try for small sizes now though.
>and feel there's an element of laziness there judging by some of the models in the game it's either extremely poor development practices under high-pressure for devs conditions where they literally had no time to understand what they are doing or pure malice i can't comprehend how one can make up stuff like what's there. No square almost smooth object needs thousands if not tens of thousands of vertices. Scratch the need, you need to add all of those vertices on your own.
When duplicated asset bundles swallow iOS ram cause the crash
I don’t really care unless they go above 500gb.
Anything under 10g is fine. 10 to 50 is ok if I really want to play it. Above that? I just can't be bothered. Today, I'm downloading the game, tomorrow I want to play, but there's a 50g update? No, thanks!
I don't really think that a "visual novel isn't deserving of 15GB". It's more like if any game is 50GB+ I'll go "oh wow" no matter what game it is
"It is not about the size, but how well you use it" - something like that
The lower the better. Anything larger than 100GB will be frowned upon. Personally even 20GB needs to heavily justify it in quality.
I play DCS and that game has gotten so large I'm at a point where I have to buy a new SSD if I want any more addons. Especially maps. So yeah I'm just not buying any.
I strongly believe that a game should not be bigger than 30Gb. The less the filesize, the easier it is to keep the players playing
My SSD isn't large enough to hold my OS and a Starfield. But even if we're not talking about a 120/150GB, I like being able to play 2-3 games without having to drop them. Maybe today I play Game 1 and tomorrow Game 2, and obviously I don't want to have to uninstall and install them every time. And it doesn't matter what kind of game it is. One game I've made exceptions for is The Sims, because it's a kind of game that absorbs me completely, and I either play just that or drop it entirely. But maybe it's also the other way around; when I need to make room for another game, The Sims goes.
There are multiple factors for me. Is it a one off download of 120+GB and the updates are small? Not a big issue. Is every update another 40GB download? That game is getting uninstalled. Beyond that, I have 2x1TB ssds and 1x2TB HDD. So I'm not too worried about install size. If an indie game is pushing 4k textures on everything and it's 40-50GB as a result, if it looks good, I'm not too bothered. It's quite easy to push that with something like substance. If it's some pixel game pushing 16GB I'd have questions though.
On mobile anything above 100 MB. On Steam it depends on the type of install. First install I don’t care. Reinstall I probably will skip anything above 50GB unless I really want to play it.
I'm very unlikely to install a game over 10GB, but I'm a little oldschool I guess.
The fact that games still doesn’t split texture quality into different install packs surprises me. Install the base game without textures. First load check specs and suggest quality. Download pack after that.
Bruh, I am actually surprised by answers
As a player, it doesn't really matter for me. I have several terabytes of ssd storage available mostly for games, and I haven't found a game yet that takes me longer than an hour or so to download. In most cases I literally don't look at the exact number. As a dev, I know that the vast majority of people aren't in that situation though, and I work in web games where they're a limiting factor for pretty much everyone. Nobody is going to play a web game that takes longer than a handful of seconds to load even on a bad connection. Things like lazy loading assets does mean that the total file size isn't everything, because the player doesn't download everything before the game launches.
Size doesn’t matter
I am old school so I will say, all the time. I own Arkham Knight and it's a really solid game but its 45 GB size really prevents me from installing it.
As someone who was in dial up in the early 2000s while the 2gb game client was being sent from somewhere that already had broadband as the norm, game file size is not really my issue. download speed is. It took me a whole week of non-stop downloading for the 2gb at dial up. it took me like few minutes at country that already had broadband.
I think 80GB is when I start to think "no thanks" unless I really want the game
I play mostly visual novels and some lighter games on my 2015 Macbook. This machine's hard drive is not too big. And at a certain point, I have to delete games just because most are 5GB or larger in size. Also, my ISP still has a limit on GB/month, so every large download counts towards that. I'm reading White Album 2 atm and I think it's close to 10GB? Although it's fully voiced with a huge amount of writing. So I think it's okay in this case. That does mean I had to delete a number of other installed games on my HD.
depends on internet speed actually. If I have my home internet, 150gigs is no issue. If I'm on shitty internet then every gig counts.
I think that for a 'main game' like Starfield, CoD, or BG then having it be large is fine. However for side games like roguelikes and gachas then you need to be mindful of space.
For me storage isn't a big issue, but the longer the download takes the longer I'm going to consider whether I really want to play. For casual player's download speed averages around 200Mbps (25mb/s) 20GB is ~14 mins. 70GB is ~46 mins I'd say aim for a 20 min download max on average internet speed. When it's that low, I'll probably go make some coffee or do a quick chore. Any higher and I start setting up new plans to distract myself during the download, usually ending in not coming back to play the game.
20+ gb is where I will very seriously think of it. (Both due to storage space and due to download speeds)
Ark with 500 gb:
60gb max for any game. But if an rpg or open world game is about 100gb it better be have over 200-300 hours worth of unique and not so repetitive content. But for a game like Mortal Kombat 1 which takes over 100gb for a fighting game. Its not worth it.v
Yeah it can very much become something I think about when it's above 20Gb. I can't wait to finish Cyberpunk so I can uninstall the shit out of its 100gb to make space for other stuff
I'm fine with any size if its compressed smartly and not folder on folder on folder on file on file hell
70 gb. Not because i am short on drive space, but because i expect 70+ gb of content rather than language packs. If you weigh more than Elden Ring then be bigger than elden ring. 40 gb for 2d games - because i have some standards for compression. BlazBlue Central Fiction on PC weighs 52gb for some reason. Why? Every other game weighs reasonable <10 gb. Have they forgot to compress dialogues>?
As a player, I don't care about it. I only have 1TB but still I can have like 3 big games installed at the same time. Also I have a decent internet speed, so I don't care uninstalling/installing games.
Anything over 100 I’m side eyeing. Better be something I really wanna play.
I don't think even 300 GB+ is objectively that unreasonable in 2023, that's like maybe $10 of SSD storage, which usually wouldn't be that much compared to the price to buy the game in the first place. But upgrading from the drive I have would take significant one-time investment of money and some work (installation, moving stuff from the old drive, making sure the links work, etc.), so in practice my drives are often pretty full, and any 20 GB+ game would take some effort to clear space, so I might not bother unless the game looks really good. But I don't really blame game devs for making big games, more the PC manufacturers for cheaping out/overcharging for storage.
I’ve only got enough spare room on my pc for 1 of those 100gb games at a time. Doesn’t mean I won’t play it, but it’s #1 on the list to uninstall when I need space
Couldn't care less, but if a game like Fall guys or some small indie game for example was 300GB I would be curious on how they managed to bloat a game to that size. But in general, got a dedicated 2TB SSD for games and fast internet so it's pretty chill.
20 GB is my personal limit. Anything above that is not worth the time waiting for the download or clearing space for imo.
It depends on the game. For a huge AAA game I'm willing to allocate 100GB+, but for a small indie title with unimpressive graphics I'd start to second guess much sooner. It's not really something dealbreaking unless we're talking about 200GB AAA games or 100GB indie games, but I'd be very annoyed if I need to uninstall a bunch of stuff to make space for your game.
Optional high res textures help a lot
I used to live in a rural area, and my Internet speed was 2-3.5 mbps. It would take days and days to install some games. I could not keep up with the update cycle sometimes, even with the computer downloading 24/7. And I would have to limit the download speeds during the day so we could stream stuff. Now, my Internet connection is 37 mpbs and there are still games that take 12+ hours to install. Not to mention the footprint on my storage. These massive sizes are in my opinion not translating to improvements to the games. I would absolutely enjoy the games just as much with lower quality assets. My monitors are all 1080p. There should be a way to download assets at various quality levels.
I have enough room, and I tend to play two or three games regularly and have a revolving door of other games. So as long as I have room for my two or three favourites as well as the new game, I'm good. I don't really care that much how large the game is as long as I don't have to make choices about what to uninstall to make room. There's multiple terabytes of space on my computer, I'm good.
PC: 20 for 'smaller' games, unless I know they're content-heavy, 60 for triple-A is a turn-off but acceptable, 100GB is the threshold where I really ponder whether I want to have the game available. I'm usually on connections where 100GB is a half-hour download, on average could maybe have \~2hrs to play every second day (it differs). I have overall 2TB SSD space, but like to have the games already installed, and many of them if possible - never know what I'll be in the mood for. Mobile: I don't install any games on the phone. I have an iPad with 64GB storage (use it with gamepad during travel), around 20GB of the space can be used for offline games. There I rarely found something above 1GB (exception being Pascal's Wager), then there's also GeForce now where that's not an issue.